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Two bodies have been recovered by divers searching the wreckage of Mike Lynch’s Bayesian superyacht off the coast of Sicily, an Italian official said.
The bodies have been removed from the rubble and are being examined by the coroner, the official told the Financial Times.
Two ambulances left the port of Porticello with police cars just before 5pm on Wednesday, as new details emerged about the apparent speed at which a celebratory trip turned into disaster.
Lynch, one of the UK’s top tech entrepreneurs, was one of six passengers who went missing after Bayesian’s severe storm on Monday. Her 18-year-old daughter and Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International Group Chairman Jonathan Bloomer are also missing.
Divers, aided by an underwater drone, managed to access part of the sunken boat earlier Wednesday after struggling for two days to reach its cabins.
The trip on the Lynch family’s 56-metre superyacht was intended to celebrate the autocratic founder’s recent acquittal by a US jury after a 12-year legal battle over the $11bn sale of the software group to Hewlett-Packard.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bagares, was among the 15 rescued early Monday morning.
Italian prosecutors are investigating after the boat sank within minutes, killing one crew member.
“Everything happened very fast,” Vincenzo Zagarola, a coast guard official, told the FT, as Italian divers continued efforts to enter the wreck on the seabed on Wednesday.
Winds on the British-registered yacht reached 60 knots (over 110 km/h), which is classified as a Force 11 or “violent gale” on the Beaufort scale.
The speed at which the 540-ton boat sank remains the biggest mystery about the accident, which usually takes a large, modern ship much longer to founder, whether it’s driven by the wind or lands completely on its side. overturned.
Sinking so quickly, the crew did not have time to send a Mayday distress signal. The first sign of an emergency was a red flare fired from a lifeboat seen by the Coast Guard and the skipper of a boat anchored nearby, who rescued 15 survivors.
When the Coast Guard reached the spot of fire, the boat was completely submerged.
Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Invoke Capital, founded by Lynch, described to medical staff how she fell asleep in her room and suddenly woke up with her young daughter Sophia in the water, said Domenico Cipolla, director of Palermo’s emergency department. De Cristina Children’s Hospital.
When the 36-year-old mother lost her grip on her toddler’s hand, she said it was “looking death in the eye,” according to Cippola. Kolunsky told how it all happened in a couple of minutes.
The family was discharged from hospital and is now receiving counseling at a hotel in Santa Flavia along with other survivors.
Fabio Genco, head of the Palermo emergency medical services, told the FT: “The girl’s father and others said that some objects fell on their heads when the boat was sinking. Dad said everything lasted three to five minutes. Survivors spoke of being in the dark in the middle of the ocean.
In the nearby town of Termini Imeris, the public prosecutor’s office, together with the coast guard of Porticello, has launched an investigation into the accident, “to establish the exact mechanics of the shipwreck”, the coast guard announced.
Zagarola previously told the FT that the coastguard was still “looking for missing people, not bodies”, although there was no hope that anyone would survive if they were trapped in the boat.
The search for the six missing men also continued in the picturesque fishing port of Porticello, Porto Bagnera, where the luxury yacht sank 400 meters from shore early Monday morning.
Perini Navi, the Viareggio-based shipyard that Bayesian built in 2008, has been absorbed by the listed Italian offshore group in 2022, which declined a request for comment when contacted by the FT.
Additional reporting by Victor Mallet in London
